ed_grover's Full Review: Milwaukee Art Museum and Franz Schulze - Building ...
The much talked-about 142,000 square foot Santiago Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum has opened to much acclaim. To celebrate this, the Museum has published a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book (10 ½ wide by 11 ½ Inches high and over and inch thick) filled with photographs of their collections and a complete history of art and collecting in a city that should be known for more than a leaky $450 million baseball stadium, beer, brats and cheese.
Unfortunately, most of the photographs of the addition (including the cover) are computer generated. The building, which looks like it is surrounded by acres of open, landscaped space and lake, is in reality, squished between the truly awful and crumbling O’Donnell Park parking structure and a rather narrow strip of land between North Lake Drive (now dubbed Museum Drive) and the edge of Lake Michigan. Milwaukee seems to have a thing for renaming perfectly good streets.
When I saw a listing for the book, Building A Masterpiece in the database, I immediately ordered it from the library. Now DiverPam has kindly added some Milwaukee Destinations to the database and finally the Milwaukee Art Museum is among them.
The Spanish architect created a strange looking pedestrian suspension bridge that floats between O’D. Park and the upper deck of the new addition. When you walk across, you end up descending some stairs and arrive at a terrace and the entrance. All in all, it looks more and more like something that escaped from a Carnival Cruise dock!
One must get a nice view of the Art Museum and its new addition from the lake if one happens to be in a yacht or a sailboat. All we landlubbers get is a partial view of the great Burke Brise Soleil (a moveable sunscreen) that crowns the new $100 million Quadracci Pavilion. This wing-like structure forms a barely visible link to Milwaukee at the east end of Wisconsin Avenue, where it also acts as a background and anchor to a great orange steel sunburst sculpture by Mark di Suvero. A lot of people it want moved or torn down.
Everyone who is anyone with money in Milwaukee has donated bushels of funds to this project. The Quadracci’s are a large printing firm with a reputation for giving. Mrs. Q. (who publishes Milwaukee Magazine) lives across the street in the Cudahy Towers, where she overlooks her donation. It must be nice to have a condo overlooking a building named after you.
I recently went to the see the building with a friend who was a member. We went to see Chilhuly Over Venice, an exhibit of Dale Chilhuy’s glass chandelier-like sculptures. They were most impressive but not as impressive as they were on the documentary of their making that has been shown several times on PBS.
Back to the book, which gives us a genesis of public art in Milwaukee. This introductory section is wonderfully written by Russell Bowman, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM).
We get a rundown of all the important gift acquisitions, exhibitions and other individual donations of art to the Museum. MAM is the home of the fourth largest collection of Georgia O’Keeffe works in the USA and O’Keeffes O’Keeffes: The Artists collection was the opening exhibition during the summer of 2001.
Captain Frederick Layton (meat-packing and export) donated our first public art space and all of its art to the City in 1888. The Layton Art Gallery stood about four blocks from where I now live. It was located kitty-corner from the Pfister Hotel and was torn down and replaced by a monstrous rusted metal parking structure/office building in the late 60s.
Prior to that the Gallery became an art school. It was there that I had my first formal art training on Saturday mornings during the late 1940s. The school was run by two grand old dames: Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink; they were Milwaukee’s answer to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as far as the art scene was concerned. They were much loved and were more than companions, if you know what I mean.
The Milwaukee Art Institute (founded in 1887) moved to permanent quarters near the Layton Art Gallery in 1916. It devoted itself to wide-ranging exhibitions including a show of adventurous American Modernist art in 1918. It had a show of Impressionism (1928), an exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright and Thomas Hart Benton (1930-31), a show in conjunction with the fledgling Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City )1933), and a show on Dada and Surrealism (1937). We are not devoid of Kulture here in the hinterland, no matter what anyone says.
In 1947 the Milwaukee War Memorial was proposed, and Eliel Saarinen was hired to design the building at the end of The Lincoln Memorial Bridge at the lakefront. Eliel died and his son finished the project. Both the Layton Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Institute committed to move to the new building, which we all thought resembled a clock radio, and has since become a much loved landmark. It is to the War Memorial and Art Museum (with its 1975 addition by a Milwaukee firm) that Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s addition is connected.
Franz Schulze, emeritus professor of art at Lake Forest College, has written a perceptive essay on Calatrava and his works. They are modern to the extreme and some of them look interesting to me, but they are no match for MOMA's Bilbao Museum in Spain. That building wouldn’t have worked here, either, so there’s no point of me dwelling on it.
The balance of the book is devoted to excellent color photo-reproductions of the new addition and highlights of the collection, with introductions written by the curators for each individual collection within the Museum.
Those collection include:
Ancient, Asian and African Art: The highlights are, in part,. an ornate, stylized Egyptian coffin, Greek red-figured pottery, a powerful first-second century A.D. Roman torso, Ming Dynasty pottery and scrolls, Japanese prints and African ancestor figures and wooden stools. It’s a small but growing collection that is of great interest to everyone who visits.
Early European Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts:include rich holdings of Dutch, French and Spanish paintings, including Zurbaran’s painting of Saint Francis of Assisi. There is English, Italian and Flemish portraiture. There are French porcelains, Medieval and German Renaissance clocks, Murano glass, Flemish tapestries and decorative objects inlaid with precious stones and ivory. We have a Fragonard shepherdess and Dutch floral paintings.
Nineteenth Century European Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts: Here the viewer finds the Layton collection, which include the huge painting, “The Wood Gatherer” by Jules Bastien-Lepage who painted a record of the countryside of 1876.
This painting was always a favorite of mine since my days as an art student. It shows an old man with a load of wood on his back and a young girl who is picking flowers as they move along through the woods. The text says, "This painting represents the weariness of old age and the innocence of youth." Here we also find works by Gustave Courbet, Jean-Leon Gerome, Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet and a painted plaster cast of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin.
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century American Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts: Here one finds more of the Layton collection including Eastman Johnson’s portrait of Layton. There’s lots of gorgeous furniture (a carved Victorian Belter sofa), silver and portraits by Gilbert Stuart and Charles Wilson Peale and a painting by Winslow Homer. Not too shabby for the being in the Midwest and not Chicago!
Early Twentieth Century European Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts: It’s time for modern paintings from the Milwaukee Art Institute collection. Here there we find Georges Braque, Maurice Vlamink, Ferdinand Leger, Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miro, to name only a few. There’s a wonderful Marcel Breuer reclining chair (1932) a Giacometti sculpture and paintings by Picasso and Pierre Bonard.
Early Twentieth Century American Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts: Here there is a marble head by Elie Nadleman (1908-09) and some Art Nouveau silver. Maurice Pendergast paintings, that huge statue of a standing woman by Gaston Lachaise, models by Brooks Stevens, paintings by Ben Shahn, Milton Avery, all the O’Keeffes, Stuart Davis and a sofa and ottoman by Isamu Noguchi
Contemporary Art: This collection includes the Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley collection of modern art. there’s Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, , Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Chuck Close. There are also works by Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer. There’s a huge crockery painting by Julian Schnable. The sculpture includes installations (which I don’t like), wax and plaster casts and other assemblages made of string (Eva Hesse) and piles of stone (Robert Smithson).
Prints and Drawings: This section includes a wide range of works on paper Including etchings, engravings, lithographs(Toulouse-Lautrec), silk screens (Warhol), ink drawings, watercolors, pastels (Degas, Picasso and Odilon Redon) and collages
Photographs: These are by everyone from Edward Steichen to Alfred Stiglitz. Women such as Diane Arbis and Cindy Sherman are included.These exhibits rotate and are always interesting.
Folk, Self-Taught and Hatian Art: This section includes American primitive carvings, paintings and sculptures by self-taught white and African American artists. There are wooden weather vanes and decoys. There’s Shaker furniture, drawings in colored pencil on paper and an extensive collection of Haitian Art.
This would be a wonderful, but expensive book to own. You’d have to be devoted to the arts to have it in your private library. For anyone in Milwaukee County who has a computer, I’d suggest going online to http://www.mpl.org and checking out a copy like I did. Or, you could go and visit the Museum on a free morning on any Wednesday or Saturday until 11 a.m. After that, it’s $6 for adult and $4 for seniors and students.
The lobby and atrium is stunning with the brise-soliel over it and a giant Alexander Calder mobile spining lazily away near the entrance. It used to live at our (now International) airport but was not much noticed and was moved to its new home where it is greatly appreciated. It was donated by Jane Bradley Petit.
When we were there, there was a small temporary restaurant off the main lobby with great views, uncomfortable chairs and pre-packaged food and drink.The restaurant is now called a Cafe and is located one flight down under the great hall where the brise-soliel is located. Those uncomfortable chairs and their tables are all shoved into an all too small space that overlooks the lake.
The menu is better than I expected it would be, but it's too expensive for self-service on plastic trays like McDonalds. It seems that they have done away with counter service and you now order and pay at the register. Your food is delivered to you at your table. It's much better and very tasty, but it's still expensive. 01/07/02).
I for one will not pay $1 for bottled water when Milwaukee has perfectly good (and very tasty) public water for free. I won't pay $1.25 for a cookie or $3 for a cup of soup either. Sandwiches are $6 to $11, Salads are $6 up to $14. Be forewarned!
You will find a gift shop with wonderful fixtures designed by Calatrava located down one of the interior passages that resemble the carcass of a bird or a maybe a large fish. It's very nice and very expensive.
The white marble interior can be blinding, but the indirect light does wonders for the art works. Beware of the marble floors, which can be slippery and wear comfortable shoes; if you do the whole museum, you’ll need them.
I seem to remember there was a nicer restaurant and what seemed to be a moderately-priced gift shop in one of the old buildings, which by the way, have had a complete dusting and cleaning and are very presentable. When I went back for my second visit with friends from New York to see the Milton Avery exhibit I found out that the other gift shop and restaurant were no more.
(The redesign of the old part of the museum is brilliant! Whoever is responsibe for that piece of work deserves a raise. For instance, the French paintings now have their own beautiful French-blue room and have French furniture and porcelain of the period to make them feel more at home. It's a lovely layout and don't miss it all. 01/07/02).
This handsome book is dedicated to Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley (600 modern works of art from Mrs. B. and the Allen-Bradley Company) and Jane Bradley Petit, who recently died of cancer and was one of this City’s greatest benefactors. She gave a major portion to the new addition, plus her gifts helped fund the stadium and the Bradley Center, home of the Milwaukee Bucks. (Hudson Hill Press, ISBN: 1-55595-201-1).
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